Museo Juan Manuel Blanes
Montevideo, Uruguay

"At the back, the enormous concrete LEGO pressing the reason of life, the secret code in an oppressive silence, a piece as shocking as the obscure monolith from Stanley Kubrick´s "2001, A space odyssey". The remaining small blocks are adjusted to obey a model. They make part of a library where the signs of verbal language were hidden and no traces were left, no stories labyrinths, no books, no referrer authors. This archipielago of concrete and woods occupies the center of the hughe exhibition room, small islands over tall pedestals. It also occupies the space of knowledge and fiction, of history and thought. They are surrounded by extremely beautiful paintings, where silence and solitude prevail, the geometry seduction that opens and closes spaces as if they were doors or windows, the planes of muffled tones, the transit of a colour over others in brilliant harmony, the smoothness of collage layers.

It is a landscape that obliges to transit by spirit passages, emotional translations like in a Babel of sensations, experiences, emotions".

Carlos Muñoz
"Eloísa Ibarra at the Blanes Museum: The concrete library" (fragment)
Búsqueda weekly
May 4, 2017

Repose
Mixed media, 8 pieces
Wood, concrete, cardboard, paper, brick
9.5 x 64 x 23 cm
2003-16

Silence
Mixed media, 4 pieces and fraction
Concrete, cardboard
Variable dimensions, approx. 8 x 13 x 4.5 in
2003-16

The latest works by Eloísa Ibarra were conceived as sculptural groups after observing their successive order in her bookcase: the pieces of concrete and wood alternated and huddled “sideways” between book spines, as if they were volumes of a heterogeneous encyclopedia. In the path to new artistic possibilities the “books” quickly expanded in space to become some sort of bastions or maquettes of ancient buildings, or at least that is how we cannot help but see them: Maybe the ruins of Borgean Tlön? Vestiges of the current and besieged Aleppo? Shelf reunions or still lifes in the style of the work of Carmen Calvo? It may not matter as much to elucidate it as to leave the questions open, stated. 

Pablo Thiago Rocca
"The seed, the mirror and the shadow (of language) Reflections on the works of Eloísa Ibarra"
(fragment) ) from Temperance and Abyss (Mesura y abismo) Museo Juan Manuel Blanes, 2017